A framework for designing new products and services

Abstract

Customer satisfaction is an important objective in all areas of business and services. A key issue in today's design activities is to achieve customer satisfaction in an economical way by finding the attributes that are most valuable to customers. In this paper we propose a formal and efficient methodology to design a new service, which is an improvement on a platform service. We propose a methodology to link two tools - the statistical design of experiments (SDE), for data collection, and quality function deployment (QFD), for the development of conceptual alternatives. The focus is only on functional dimensions, but it can be used in symbolic and aesthetic dimensions. The study uses a recent survey on the development of an operations management course curriculum to illustrate the conjoint methodology.